Sub Sighted, Sank Same

THE ATLANTIC BATTLE WON (399 pp.)--Samuel Eliot Morison--Atlantic-Little, Brown ($6).

In May 1945 the German U-boats steamed back from the Atlantic flying the black flags of surrender. In all, 181 U-boats gave up, and another 217 were destroyed by their crews. During the course of the Atlantic war, 699 more had been sunk by the Allies, and another 82 had been lost through accidents of war. They had been Hitler's best bet to keep the U.S. from sending effective help to Europe, and for a time in 1942 and 1943 it had looked as though the bet would pay off. Together with Italian subs, they had sent more than 3,000 Allied ships and 40,000 men to the bottom.

In Volume X (The Atlantic Battle Won) of his huge history of the U.S. Navy in World War II, Harvard's Professor Samuel Eliot Morison writes: "The Atlantic, which since the dawn of history has been taking the lives of brave and adventurous men, must have received more human bodies into its ocean graveyard during the years 1939-45 than in all other naval wars since the fleets of Blake and Van Tromp grappled in the Narrow Seas." And Rear Admiral Morison, U.S.N.R., adds: "Sailormen all, and passengers too, we salute you!"

Author Morison's Atlantic is itself a crisp, readable salute to the U.S. and British flyers, seamen and scientists who met and smashed what may well have been Nazi Germany's toughest and most ruthless service. The measure of U.S. unreadiness can easily be taken by anyone who remembers the near contempt with which German subs sank ships in broad daylight within sight of the East Coast. How quickly Allied brains and guts turned the tide can be read in Morison's triumphant figures: of nearly 13,000 ships that sailed the North Atlantic in convoy in 1944, only 13 were sent to the bottom.

A certain portion of Atlantic is necessarily given over to a workmanlike description of: 1) Allied naval organization, 2) German Admiral Doenitz' changes of strategy and tactics, and 3) Allied changes of pace and weapons to meet them. Right up until the end of the war, there were new types of subs abuilding, and Doenitz still hoped to send the bulk of the U.S. war effort to the ocean floor. But for the most part, Historian Morison recites the details of battle after battle, sinking after sinking, with a sailor's relish that keeps the pages turning at a speed uncommon for readers of sound history. Several writers--notably Commander Edward L. Beach in Submarine! (TIME, June 9, 1952) and Run Silent, Run Deep (TIME, April 4)--have graphically described the fearful strain and special terrors of the submariner's life. Author Morison, with his painstaking accuracy and his historian's gusto, is a ship of a different class. Disdaining fiction, and finding his excitement in verified facts, he reaches port, ties to his berth and reports: mission accomplished ; this is the way it was.

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